


a soft heart in a hard world (takes courage, takes strength)

by lovebeyondmeasure



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: Canon Universe, Implied/Referenced Child Death, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Not Beta Read, One Shot, Shippy Gen, but it is hopeful and sometimes that's enough, this is not fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 14:31:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16599713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovebeyondmeasure/pseuds/lovebeyondmeasure
Summary: “I’ve had that thought before. Everyone in SIB has. You see so many people willing to do the worst things to other people, you start to think maybe that’s how everyone is, on the inside, way down deep. Maybe the world’s just like that, at some level. Like there’s a baseline of human suffering that’s just… natural. To be expected.”“No,” Robin said. “I can’t believe that. I won’t, even when I want to. I can’t live in a world where that’s true.”“What if it is, though?” Cormoran asked, playing a touch of devil’s advocate, almost despite himself. He found he wanted to hear what she’d say. He wanted her to convince him, too.





	a soft heart in a hard world (takes courage, takes strength)

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: This fic is not fluff. It starts off with a fictional bombing at a mosque, and touches on the death of children several times. None of this is detailed to the reader, but it's not a casual conversation, either. You are under no obligation to read this fic, especially if these topics will be painful or harmful for you.
> 
> It's about the darkness in the world, the weight of it, and how we carry it. And at its core, this fic is about hope.
> 
>  _“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”_ \- [Iain Thomas](http://www.domestiphobia.net/2012/11/15/lets-get-something-straight-i-do-mind/)

Cormoran had been in his office for two hours, reviewing the footage a new client had sent them that he insisted would prove his wife was having an affair. All Cormoran had found so far was a fondness for Starbucks iced coffees and regular trips to the gym, and also the beginning of a headache. 

Taking off his headphones, he became aware of the quiet sounds of a news broadcast. He got up to investigate. 

_“And as you can see from these images, it’s chaos still, an hour later. Officials have yet to release the names of the victims, but there are at least seven confirmed casualties, and there may be as many as-”_

He opened the door, eyes going directly to Robin, who was watching her computer monitor with tears rolling silently down her cheeks. 

“Robin? You all right?”

She wiped her face, biting her lip. “Have you heard? There was a bombing in Krakow. Outside a mosque.”

“Jesus,” Cormoran said, coming out to lean against the arm of their couch. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah. It was timed-” her voice wavered, but she swallowed, continued on- “it was timed to coincide with the end of the daycare. To get to the mothers, and their-”

Now her voice did break, and she reached for a Kleenex blindly, not caring if she smudged her makeup. She took a deep breath, then another, as Cormoran watched.

“Maybe you should turn that off,” he suggested as kindly as he could. “I don’t think this is doing you any good.”

“No,” she said, then again, more firmly, “no. I need to- I need to know. I need to bear witness.”

“There’s plenty of others bearing witness, Robin. It’s alright.”

“I don’t know how you did this, day after day,” she said, eyes back on the screen, not listening to him. “I know that people hurt others. I know that. But just- targeting _children? Mothers?_ ”

“People do terrible things when they think they have a just cause,” Cormoran said.

“There’s no just cause in the world to kill a child,” Robin bit out, her teeth bared. “Not a single one.”

“No,” Cormoran said, struck by the thought that she had never been so beautiful to him as that moment, with tear-stained cheeks and vicious justice on her lips. “There isn’t.”

The newscaster was consulting experts on terrorism, and it was a hard thing to realize that he recognized at least one by name. 

_“Now no group has claimed responsibility for this as of yet, is that right?”_

_“That’s correct, although some reports are saying that the young men who orchestrated this attack were radicalized during a trip abroad-”_

Robin was crying again, silently, just letting her tears fall unheeded. Cormoran knew that the images she was looking at were of destruction and violence; he hoped they hadn’t broadcast any images of bodies. Tiny bodies, laying still, face-down, face- _up,_ he could see them in his so-reliable memory-

“Turn it off, would you,” he said, his voice gone gruff, commanding. “Please.”

Robin was looking at him with her big wet eyes, and he could see the understanding in them.

“Sure,” she said quietly, clicking twice. The steady voices of the newscasters cut off, and the silence was loud in his ears.

“How did you do it?” she asked, voice soft. “How did you- process? All of it?”

The weight. The grief. The faces. The names. 

“I’m not quite sure that I have,” Cormoran found himself saying. “You just go on, I think. You just wake up and put one foot ahead of the other and drink coffee and catch the Tube and you just…. don’t stop.”

The look Robin was giving him was as familiar as his own battered face in a mirror. He could see there that she knew what he meant.

“The weight of it can either sink you down or make your stronger. You just have to keep going, keep carrying it,” he said, feeling his way to the end of the thought. “You find new ways to carry on.”

Robin was nodding, absently wiping tears from her chin. She had once hidden her tears from him, from everyone; what a different creature this Robin was, who was so unashamed to cry. 

“A lot of people don’t, though,” he said.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I think you’re right. I don’t blame them, though. It’s… it’s too much, for a lot of people. There’s too much suffering in this world for any one person to carry.”

Cormoran blamed them. He didn’t say so, but he thought his face might have given him away. 

“There’s a lot of people who can’t forget,” he pointed out. “Because they’re too close to it. What gives the rest of us a right to look away?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Robin said. “We all have a duty to do the right thing. To do as much as we can with what we have. But to hold all of this in your mind, in your heart, all at once? The wars and the famines and the shootings and the bombings- it’ll burn you out. Burn the heart right out of your chest. Compassion fatigue, it’s called. When you see so much suffering that it begins to turn into background noise, or wallpaper. Just part of how the world is.”

“Yeah,” Cormoran said. “I’ve had that thought before. Everyone in SIB has. You see so many people willing to do the worst things to other people, you start to think maybe that’s how everyone is, on the inside, way down deep. Maybe the world’s just like that, at some level. Like there’s a baseline of human suffering that’s just… natural. To be expected.”

“No,” Robin said. “I can’t believe that. I won’t, even when I want to. I can’t live in a world where that’s true.”

“What if it is, though?” Cormoran asked, playing a touch of devil’s advocate, almost despite himself. He found he wanted to hear what she’d say. He wanted her to convince him, too.

“It isn’t,” she said again. “Because that’s what they want you to think. The men who hurt women, who plant bombs to kill little kids.” Her voice cracked. and he could see the tears in her eyes again, threatening to spill. “They want that to be true, because that makes what they do okay. That justifies their actions. And there’s nothing that justifies them, _nothing._ The world isn’t a good place, or a soft place, but we can make it better through our actions. We all choose our actions, every day, and those men who planted that bomb chose to do it the same way you chose to help put people like them behind bars. The same way the doctors operating on the survivors chose to help people.”

Now the tears spilled, but she just kept talking.

“If I start to believe that the world is just _like that,_ just hard and cruel and that’s how it is, then they win. I let them win. And I won’t let them. It might be a naive thing to believe, but I don’t think cynicism will solve anything either. I won’t let them make me hard and, and cruel. I won’t let them make me believe that people are bad unless proven otherwise. I won’t give them that part of myself. Because they want it, they want me to believe that.”

She plucked another tissue, and Cormoran found himself nodding, agreeing. He was already hardened, already a cynic, but there was a kernel of something deep in him that responded to Robin’s impassioned speech. There was, perhaps, a corner of his soul that still hoped that there were people who would run towards a disaster, and not away. Most of his life he’d learned the opposite; people turn their faces, avert their eyes, refuse to see the pain and hardship around them. But Robin believed, or wanted to believe, and he found that perhaps a tiny part of him wanted to believe too. 

“It’s a hard world, but I don’t see how me becoming hard with it does anything to make it better. I’d rather- I’d rather stay soft, and cry, and hurt, than pretend I don’t feel anything and turn into a hard shell of a person. I won’t let them have that part of me. I won’t let them take that softness away.”

Robin’s face was blotchy-pink and her tears had smudged her eye makeup all awry, but she nearly shone with a kind of steely determination. Cormoran found himself re-evaluating her determination to save everyone, to be kind no matter the cost to herself. 

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice was rough, scratchy in his throat. Robin blinked at him.

“Yeah?” She sniffled a bit, giving him what might have been the beginning of a smile. “I practically monologue your ears off, and that’s all you have to say?”

“Yeah,” he said again, just to make her smile, and oh, she did. “You’re not wrong, Robin Ellacott.”

“High praise indeed,” she said, wiping away the last of her quiet tears. “I’m going to put the kettle on, want a cuppa?”

“I won’t say no, but I was going to ask if you wanted to get takeaway, actually,” Cormoran said. “Try that new Ethiopian place, maybe?”

Robin bit her lip, and Cormoran wanted to wipe that uncertainty away, wanted to give her the world- “My treat,” he said. 

“Well, if you’re paying,” she said, smiling at him again as she filled the kettle. Cormoran levered himself off the arm of the couch, his legs a bit stiff from leaning for so long. 

They were still cautious around each other, emotionally, physically, and Cormoran wasn’t one for big gestures. But he walked over to the kitchenette where Robin was setting the kettle to boil and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against his chest for what he’d planned to be a brief moment. He was surprised when, instead, her arms came up right away, grasping him tightly, her face pressing against his shirt. 

There was a part of him wondering if she was smearing mascara on him, but the majority of his brain was focused on Robin, in his arms, the warmth of her, the way her hands had fisted in his button-up, the way her hair smelled. His other arm came up to the small of her back, and her breath caught in her throat, hitching, almost like she was about to cry again.

“You’re a wonder, Robin Ellacott,” Cormoran said in his rough voice. “I’m glad you haven’t let the world make you hard. It doesn’t deserve you.”

“Thank you,” she said damply into his shoulder. “I- thank you, Cormoran.”

They stood there for any number of heartbeats, settled in each other’s arms as though there was nowhere else to be before Cormoran realized that he really ought to let her go. He gave himself one more moment before loosening his grip, taking a step back as soon as Robin’s arms began to drop.

“So,” he said, clearing his throat. Robin was looking down at the linoleum before bringing her eyes back up to his. “Ethiopian, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, managing a smile for him once more. 

Cormoran nodded, unable to articulate any of the inconvenient feelings writhing in his chest into anything approaching coherency. 

“Just let me know what you want,” he said instead. 

“Sure,” she replied, making her own retreat back to her desk, back to whatever they were calling normalcy now. “Let me just look up their menu.”

“Sounds good,” he said, turning back to his office.

“You’re a good friend, Cormoran,” Robin said behind him.

“So are you,” he said before closing his door. And she was. 

He had thought her soft heart was a weakness, something she would grow out of, work through, leave behind. But he could see now that she never would, had no desire to. And for the first time, that seemed like a strength, because he could see how hard she worked to maintain it. He knew that she was well-acquainted with the ways the world could hurt you, and she was turning her face to it to say "no, I will not give you this. This is mine, and I will keep it."

Cormoran found that he could respect that. He might even admire it. His heart had never stood a chance, but Robin was fighting for hers in a world that seemed designed to tear it from her chest. And she was winning. And wasn't that something? Wasn't she something.


End file.
